In Sickness and in Health: Disease and Western Life from the Black Death to AIDS

Dr Richard Barnett

What is disease? How has our understanding of disease – and experiences of disease – changed over time? Why did most people turn to priests, rather than doctors, during the Black Death? Why did a completely erroneous theory of cholera transmission inspire the most sweeping socio-political revolution in London’s history? How did malaria – a disease common throughout Europe in the Middle Ages – become the emblematic tropical disease in the nineteenth century? Why has cancer proved so intractable in the face of a multi-billion-pound research onslaught?

Many have argued that the answers to these questions can be found in the powerful knowledge claims of twenty-first-century biomedical science. Simply subject historical cases to the authoritative modern clinical gaze, they say, and you will learn everything about them you might possibly want to know. But why should we be so confident that this kind of ‘retrospective diagnosis’ offers the last word on the complex landscape of health and disease? Can modern biomedicine really help us to understand the experiences of practitioners and patients who thought about illness and the body in very different ways? Should we concentrate on the impressive achievements of doctors, scientists and surgeons, tracing a line from ancient ignorance to modern knowledge? Or should we try to write medical history from below, highlighting patients’ perspectives and setting older ideas of disease in their wider cultural context?

This course will give you some new and challenging ways to think about these questions, drawing on the insights of cultural history, sociology and modern biomedicine. We will consider both specific diseases – cholera, malaria, AIDS – and broader shifts in Western medical discourse, examining their cultural and medical impact on Western life over the last few centuries. In doing so, we will trace the interplay of scientific, clinical, social, religious and moral judgements invested in ‘framing’ a disease, and how these ‘frames’ have developed in different times and places. We’ll also consider the ways in which race, gender and sexuality have each been framed in pathological terms, and how these framings have been challenged.

This course is aimed at: Undergraduate-level students from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, but particularly those in the biomedical sciences, social sciences and humanities. Those with an interest in crossing disciplinary boundaries between the sciences and humanities may find this material particularly stimulating.

Pre-requisite knowledge required: No previous knowledge or experience of the subject is required. Some knowledge of historical methodology and / or Western history in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries will of course be useful, but this is by no means essential.

Transferable skills: This course will help you to hone your analytical skills, deepen your abilities in textual analysis, improve your confidence in academic debate, and develop your presentation skills. It will also give you a chance to write clearly and concisely about complex cultural and historical events, in the form of extended essays and examination answers.

Required Pre Arrival Reading

To be compulsorily read before the start of the programme

• Bynum WF et al. (2006) The Western medical tradition: 1800 to 2000. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Rosenberg CE, Golden J. (eds) (1992) Framing disease: studies in cultural history. New York: Rutgers University Press.

Further Pre-Arrival Reading

Strongly recommended but not mandatory

• Bynum WF. (1994) Science and the practice of medicine in the nineteenth century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Conrad L et al. (1995) The Western medical tradition: 800BC to AD1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cooter R, Pickstone J. (eds.) (2003) Routledge companion to medicine in the twentieth century. London: Routledge.
• Crosby AW. (1986) Ecological imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe 900-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Foucault M. (2003) The birth of the clinic: an archaeology of medical perception. London: Routledge Classics [but various other editions available].
• Harrison M. (2004) Disease and the modern world: 1500 to the present day. London: Polity Press.
• Jordanova L, ‘The social construction of medical knowledge’, in Huisman F, Harley Warner J. (eds) (2004) Locating medical history: the stories and their meanings. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp 338-363.
• Lawrence C. (1994) Medicine in the making of modern Britain. London: Routledge.
• Porter R. (1985) The patient’s view: doing medical history from below. Theory and Society 14: 175-198.
• Roberts C, Manchester K. (2005) The archaeology of disease. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
• Watts S. (1997) Epidemics and history: disease, power, imperialism. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Assessment:

• 1 Final Exam: 45%
• 1 Final Essay: 45%
• Participation, progress and attendance: 10%

Lecture Hours: 12 x 1 hour 15 minutes (total 15 hours)

Seminar Hours: 8 x 1 hour 15 minutes (total 10 hours)